Wednesday, July 16, 2008

(I've replaced my normal weekend update with this report on Anime Expo. It's broken into four parts because of its length.)

Saturday

Saturday morning was spent in line trying to get David Hayter's autograph. It would have ended in disappointment but David Hayter decided to stay 1/2 an hour later so I barely got my autograph. Total time? 2.5 hours, I got to him at like 12:20. Too close! But I do have my MGS3 instruction book signed by Kojima AND David Hayter. Clearly one of my best pieces of fanboy created merchandise yet!

I spent a good time during all 4 days playing BlazBlue, the new fighting game by the team that brought us Guilty Gear. On Saturday I spent like 3+ hours in the console room trying this out. The similarities to Guilty Gear are many, and a comparison between the two is not out of the question despite BlazBlue having 1 less button than Guilty Gear. Faultless Defense, Recovery, Burst, and Roman Cancelling appear to be back, though they have slightly different names and activations due to the change in controls. The characters themselves borrow heavily from GG, with Iron Tegar having Potemkin's throw animations and Ragna the Bloodedge looking like Sol Badguy. It would appear Jin has Johnny's Mist Viper slashes.

I had dinner at The Pantry (yeah it's within easy walking distance)...this time around I had breakfast so things went a lot better. I guess it's hard to mess up eggs and bacon.

The main event for Saturday was Masquerade. First off, the Masquerade actually started on time! (With this and the AMVs starting on time, this was truly a broken AX!) Secondly, it finished well within the allotted time probably because there weren't as many entries this year (or maybe it was capped?).

I enjoyed most of the skits, though there were some lame ones. I think part of the problem is that the participants did not know how to cut their skits down to 2 minutes without losing coherence. (Oh fanboys/fangirls...) I particularly enjoyed the Kenshiro cosplayer. Yeah, his costume was low rent but he put so much guts into his performance! He inspired me with his obviously amateurish martial arts....and he totally won a prize for his performance.

Other good performances and costumes included various Naruto and One Piece sketches (of course) and not one but TWO Odin Sphere skits. I liked how the Mercedes decided to juggle. Classy! There was also some hilariously bad puns told by a Ryu Hayabusa. (What is Spike's favorite brand of paper towels? BOUNTY!)

By far the highlight was seeing the Orange County Anime Meetup group take the stage for a Smash Brothers skit. Oh, and they won BEST IN SHOW (as they should have)! Clearly I can never cosplay again around my friends in this group since they are on a completely different level from me.